4 Translation Trends to Look for in 2019

By United Language Group

As 2018 draws to a close, it’s time to look forward at 2019. The language services industry is always changing, so what will the new year bring? These are our top four translation trends to look for in 2019.

Machine translation will continue to become more sophisticated.

Machine translation has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past year, and we expect this trend to continue for 2019.

Despite much-hyped claims to the contrary, even the most advanced machine translation engines are unlikely to replace human linguists in 2019. As language industry organization TAUS wrote concerning claims that neural machine translation has reached human parity, “at the sentence level it might be true, at the document-level it is not — the quality gap between machine and human translation is far from being closed.”

However, machine translation is already the practical solution for situations like cross-border e-Discovery and translating user-generated content. When there are terabytes of data involved, using human translators is often out of the question due to budget and time constraints. We expect the potential business applications for machine translation to grow even more in 2019 as the technology improves.

One important caveat: with an ever-growing list of data breaches top of mind for consumers and regulators alike, businesses should be wary of (or better yet, completely avoid) using unsecure free translation applications like Google Translate or Bing. Your LSP should be able to offer a customized MT solution that offers improved performance and better security. If not, give us a call!

demand for video translation will increase.

As demand for online video grows, demand for video translation and localization will naturally increase as well. That means more subtitles, including real-time subtitles for live-streamed videos. Video content will also grow more sophisticated and interactive, as companies seek to capture viewer attention in an increasingly crowded landscape. LSPs will need to be able to translate not only the words but the entire experience in a way that’s linguistically and culturally appropriate for each target market.

a changing global trade and regulatory landscape will demand a focus on Compliance.

GDPR. Trade wars. Brexit. The big stories of 2018 are the potential compliance headaches of 2019. As countries rewrite established trade laws and enact new regulations to protect their citizens’ data, international businesses will have to keep up. Naturally, so will the translation industry.

voice search will revolutionize multilingual seo.

Voice search is the next big thing in SEO, as more and more people around the world forego keyboards for voice recognition and digital assistants.

This trend will have some significant effects on global businesses:

Getting the top slot on search engines like Google is now even more critical since voice searchers tend to go with the first result they’re given. If you want your website to claim its share of voice search traffic, you need expert multilingual SEO help.

Since we don’t always speak like we type, optimizing for voice search may involve tweaking the text to make it sound more conversational. To get the results you want from your website, your language services provider needs to know how to optimize your site for both voice search and regular search.

To ensure your organization makes the most of the opportunities available in 2019, you’ll need a language partner you can trust – a language partner that anticipates global trends and harnesses both human knowledge and technology to benefit clients. You need Total Language Confidence. Start 2019 off right – contact us for your next language project today!

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